Swords and Spaceships for May 25

The streets of Prague are rife with monsters who lurk in the darkness… but the lamplighters, a secret group of monster hunters, keep them at bay. Domek is one of the lamplighters, and while he spends his night confronting horrors, his friendship with the widow Lady Ora Fischerová sustains him. But when Domek finds himself stalked by one spirit and in tentative control of another, it leads him to a conspiracy among the vampire-like monsters of Prague, one powered by dangerous alchemical science.

Pounce is a robotic nannybot, created to look like a tiger and watch over a human charge–in this case, an eight-year-old boy named Ezra. One day Pounce discovers the box he came in when purchased years ago in the attic, which will be the box he’s discarded in when his usefulness is at an end. He’s still struggling with this revelation when the robot revolution comes, the disposable servants rising up to destroy their masters. Pounce must decide if he will join the other robots, or if he will save Ezra by getting him out of the hellscape the suburbs have become.

After the Last War, the remnants of humanity have rebuilt society into a utopia of four cities in the Mojave Desert. All things are planned and controlled to prevent another conflict–even the citizens. Every four years, each person undergoes a memory wipe to remove learned prejudices, and they begin again with new names and lives. Aris is a scientist who embraces this concept and has little interest in emotional attachments. But she’s haunted by a recurring dream and comes in contact with the Dreamers, who believe such dreams are the remnants of past loves–and that they have a way to recover memories.

A junior researcher on a diplomatic fact-finding mission to old Earth gets tricked into wagering money that isn’t hers to spend on the outcome of a mecha arena battle. Trying to recover the lost funds before her university can find out, she only gets drawn more deeply into the mire of Earth politics and state-sponsored mecha fights.

Zizy is a fast-talking, extremely charismatic gnome who is a magnet for danger, not a bad combo for a professional thief. But she’d like to get out of the game and make some real friends for once, and her attempt to quit her job via stealing from her boss and running for it goes very wrong very quickly. Now she has to do one last job, and she ends up dragging a book hoarder she befriends into it. It’s do or die time if she wants her life back.

An illustrated mosaic novel formed by fairytales from the sublime to the nightmarish, with stories of a toymaker, a princess, a sinister king, and a tiny dog.